Family Portrait
by moodiful819
Summary: Growing up, Kakashi never had his pictures put on the refrigerator. Mild Kakasaku.


Written after I cleaned my room and found some old paintings I had done, which reminded me of my short stint volunteering at a daycare. A girl asked me to draw a cat and when I drew what I thought was a pretty decent cat, she asked me why my cat looked so strange because hers was a bunch of geometrical shapes with a face (her schema for what a picture of a cat looked like). A few years later, my art teacher would tell me that drawing realism is breaking down the habits we learned about drawing before—which I now know he's right about.

But I realize now that as a child, my family never put anything on the fridge. We had magnets from advertisements that we had for free and that sat on the fridge, but to put anything but a magnet was odd and inconceivable in our household. And compared to my friends' fond memories of pictures on the fridge, I feel like I missed out somehow, which is what I drew from for this oneshot.

Self-pity aside, I got to channel my inner little-kid for this oneshot. As for the picture, I drew from my little brother's old pictures for the guys and my old drawing style for the girls. Enjoy!

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><p>Growing up, Kakashi never had his pictures put on the refrigerator.<p>

Not that there was much to put up. With his father in a deep depression after the death of his mother and only having two people to put in a family portrait scrawled by chubby three-yr-old hands, drawings such as those seemed meaningless. The fridge magnets were too high to reach anyway, and compared to his classmates who at least had both parents, it seemed out of place to only draw a family of two people who had the same face.

There was also the matter of the war going on. When your life is at stake, teaching children how to hold crayons correctly and express themselves creatively seemed frivolous. The reasoning was when they survived—_if they survived_—the children could pick it up later. Right now, they had to learn how to hold a kunai, read a map, kill someone—learn how to fight a war.

Even when the war was over, there were no pictures on his refrigerator. His father was gone, and as the only remaining Hatake, a self-portrait seemed mockingly hollow thing to enshrine in colorful magnets and stickers. So instead, he went into Anbu, robbing himself of further time spent at home where magnets and white space dwelled endlessly with no end in sight.

But that was then. Now, he was almost forty (well past the age he'd thought he'd expire) and watching his four-year-old son draw as his wife slept and recovered from giving birth to their second child—a daughter this time. Though Obito had recently taken to drawing ninja and the robots he saw on TV, it seemed today it was a family portrait.

Suddenly, Obito hopped from the chair at the kitchen table, marching over to the fridge as he jumped impatiently at the door, trying to smack the picture into sticking. Realizing what he was up to, Kakashi slid easily off his chair, and taking the picture from his son's hands, stuck it onto the door amidst a sea of takeout menus, notes, and hiragana magnets.

Standing back, Kakashi observed his son's work. His hypothesis proved to be correct as he took in the four blocky characters of varying height.

On the far right was Obito's new little sister Akiko drawn in a purple bundle with a red bow to show it was a girl and not a jellybean or insect pupa. To the left of Akiko was Sakura, the second tallest person on the picture, with hastily drawn pink hair, green-dot eyes with three long eyelashes above each dot, a red smile across her white circular face, and a red triangle that Kakashi guessed was supposed to be her dress. Next to Sakura was Obito, drawn with a rectangular torso, blue pants, and his favorite orange shuriken shirt from Naruto as a red smile split across the face beneath his green-dot eyes.

Then, last but not least, was Kakashi, the tallest in the picture with a smattering of blue and green blocks where his body should've been (his jounin uniform, perhaps). A blue triangle served as the lower half of his face while a black dot served as his one visible eye. However, because Obito's marker set—_markers_, not crayons because crayons were for babies and markers were for cool big kids like him—did not include a grey marker, both Kakashi and Obito had shocks of black hair, looking much like those Saiyan characters Obito was always talking about on Saturday mornings.

"Dad…?"

At the sound of his son's high, clear voice, Kakashi looked down. Though Obito had been beaming with pride at the picture deemed worthy of being on the fridge earlier, his son was now looking at Kakashi with apprehension in his large green eyes.

"Don't you like it, dad?" Obito asked with anxiety in his tone, staring up at his father who must've seemed like a giant to the young boy.

Slowly, Kakashi let his gaze flit back to the picture; of the four clumsy, fumbling figures that were supposed to be the Hatake family—family and not just one lone boy staring into the darkness of an empty house save for him—before drinking in the chaotic mess of the fridge, of a house that was lived in and full of laughter and memories and happiness for once as a photo of Kakashi holding Obito for the first time caught his eye.

Obito tugged anxiously at Kakashi's pants, and the memories of a bare fridge dissipating into smoke, Kakashi smiled beneath his mask and ruffled his son's silver hair affectionately.

"Of course I do. I love it," he replied smiling down at his son, relishing as happiness sparkled in his son's bright green eyes.


End file.
